If this is what’s guiding psychedelic research, we’re in serious trouble.
Then there’s the pharmacokinetics section, breathlessly confirming that LSD is absorbed, peaks, and is metabolized..just like every other small-molecule drug with hepatic clearance. The BDNF findings? A biochemical footnote with no functional correlation (tossed in for faux mechanistic depth)
> Six participants had previously used LSD
> The sessions were conducted in a calm hospital room.
> Standardized lunches and dinners were served at 1:30 p.m. and 6:00 p.m
> The subjects were never alone during the first 16 h after drug administration
> The study included a screening visit, six 25 h test sessions (each separated by at least 10 days)
I understand the concept of informed consent, but the study design sounds bad to me, to be honest. According to S1, seven of the subjects had never taken any psychedelic (LSD/psilocybin/MDMA). The study confined them for their first LSD experience, and likely multiple followups, in a hospital room, with a stranger who was not on LSD. And six sessions? LSD should not be used multiple times within 1 year, in my opinion, let alone 2 weeks apart, I think multiple rapid use unnecessarily increases the low-ish risk of psychosis. No matter how nice the room, this seems unethical to me for a few reasons. People shouldn't be experiencing their first psychedelics in a hospital room unless they can't physically leave a hospital bed. I just don't think the basic dose-response curve gains us much new science, this is exactly what most people would draw who have experimented with LSD doses between 25-200ug (though the BDNF effects are interesting as another commenter mentioned).
I guess this is a general problem for all psychedelic studies, though. There's no way to place all the necessary controls around the subject, without keeping them indoors and making them feel like a trapped mouse. The inability to change your own setting during a significant psychedelic trip can definitely induce or prolong major anxiety, much more for someone experiencing novel effects for the first time.
It's good that they got data from first time users. It would be even better to get data from people who hadn't been set up with psychedelic culture expectations, but that jury pool is hopelessly tainted.
> I think multiple rapid use unnecessarily increases the low-ish risk of psychosis.
I don't think there's any good evidence that LSD affects the rate of psychosis, just the entirely expected outcome that people who have psychosis may be triggered to express that psychosis by LSD use, combined with the statistical fact that people try psychedelics at the same period of life as schizophrenics start showing their first symptoms (late teens to early 30s.)
I did my fair share and this sounds like absolute hell on earth. But then again my first trip was alone deep in the middle of the woods, still my best drug related experience so far, and that was more than a decade ago
People regularly dose LSD dozens of times a year or even month without any issues.
6 times is no big deal imo.
Not that I disagree, but the 200ug dose is generally considered safe in a clinical setting, and most doses administered were smaller. Assuming individuals were screened for mental health risks before entering the study I don't think the risk was significantly elevated because of the dosing rate.
First of all, you can't take 16 people with the drug-taking profiles listed and reliably account for their drug and alcohol intake. 100% of their sample came into the lab as drug seeking individuals. Expecting them to only take drugs under your supervision is a fairy tale. Expecting them to tell the truth about their alcohol intake is also a fairy tale. I'm not trying to be incendiary, I am speaking from experience as a recovering alcoholic with 5 years sobriety.
Second of all, 10 day spacing between doses is insane, and dangerous. Having done this particular drug many times, I can tell you that it takes at least 2 days to feel "normal". And by that, I mean "as normal as you're ever going to feel." You see, LSD changes you... forever. Each time I took LSD I only ever "came down" 99.5%. That other 0.5% stays with you for years, if not forever. You never fully "come down" all the way. You're always just a little "less" than you were before.
Thirdly; this particular drug is not just mind altering, it is life altering. It unlocks things in your mind that permanently change your perception. I don't know anyone who's taken this drug who disagrees with this statement. This permanent altering of your consciousness is literally the thing you pay for and hope to receive.
Honestly science will probably never get LSD right. In order to do so the scientists would need to experience LSD first hand, several times before they could reasonably ever begin planning such an experiment. "You just don't know what you don't know."
Why do you think that? In my experience most people that have used LSD changed little in their lives because of it. Looking back at the sixties, a lot of the people who dosed heavily then went on to work for the man or otherwise become very ordinary citizens.
The first time I took LSD it unlocked a level of thinking that I was not capable of before. For example, other people's perspectives. I fell down such a deep rabbit hole of contemplating other people's feelings and perspectives that I could literally (in that moment) FEEL other people's feelings. Obviously that is the drugs talking, and it didn't really happen like that. But in the same way that I really did see the wood grain in my coffee table bubbling like a witches cauldron, I also really did have a deep, meaningful, impactful thinking session about other people's perspective.
So when you "come down" you kind of get to keep that fullness of appreciation. The need to now consider other people is there, and your brain is fully aware how important it is now. The experience of appreciating things deeply stays with you somehow.
I agree, but to 100x less of a degree than learning French, or becoming very good at chess.
One thing we need to pay attention to is the degree to which this chemical, and this class of chemicals, have been romanticized by the culture. Especially because these drugs make you more suggestible, expectations picked up from social lore can dominate one's subjective experience, and the memory of it.
To your point about expectations; Related story: One time me and my friends got some and we were supposed to wait for a friend to get out of work before we all took it together. We couldn't wait, and passed around the tin foil containing the stuff and we each took our hits. I was last, I bought 2 hits and there were 2 tabs on the foil. So I took both of them and threw the empty foil away. 20 minutes later someone comes to me looking for the foil, because it supposably still contained 2 tabs for my friend who was on his way. It turns out that I accidentally took the 2 hits that I bought AND the 2 hits that my friend bought (the 2 tabs in the foil represented 4 hits total). I still had his tab on my tongue, so I removed it and put it back in the foil. It was totally cooked. When my friend came over, we didn't tell him and he took the his empty tabs and insisted all night that he was tripping sack, sometimes embarrassingly so. Meanwhile I was rocked out of my gourd.
I've heard from a few underground psychedelic facilitators that LSD is one of the best 'medicines' for therapy of various kinds, but (a) the duration is often uncomfortably long, (b) the social/political stigma hangover from the 60s adds undesirable connotations which can 'prime' the participant in negative ways, and (c) the variability in street doses makes it unpredictable to work with if you don't have a way of measuring potency yourself (which I would argue disqualifies you from being a facilitator to begin with, but that's a separate topic...)
As for duration, this research indicates that lower doses are metabolized much faster (6.7 hours for 50ug vs 11+ hours for 200ug) which could help although the tradeoff is less 'good effect' even if 'bad effect' is minimized as well.
However, with respect to dose potency, a PSA for anyone new to this area -- go to the /r/LSD subreddit and read the pinned post on street dosages -- in short, street doses are on average ~100ug below what they claim.
So when this study says that 50ug produces such and such effects -- and the typical psychonaut on reddit might roll their eyes at such a 'light dose' -- keep in mind that an accurate "50ug" in a lab likely means "150ug" on the street which is a fairly typical dose sold. Of course the data shows an occasional over-dosed tab vs. the reported value, too.
Which leads to the most important PSA of all: please don't put any psychoactive substance into your body without having a lot of confidence in its actual composition and dose.
The issue of people on mind-altering substances being involved with "facilitators"/therapists who use that power for their own ends showed up even in the recent MAPS trial with alleged professionals.
LSD and other psychedelics like mushrooms of mescaline are best used with someone who actually cares about you in a setting you control for self-exploration and absolutely devoid of the kind of people who become psychedlic-assisted underground therapists.
It's no different from any other potential for abuse from someone with power - the way to mitigate it isn't merely to try pick good people (of course, start there), it's to wrap the vulnerable elements in protective practices and institutional controls to prevent abuse if an individual actor fails to live up to the standard.
For example, in the biggest abuse scandal of our generation (sexual abuse by Catholic priests), it's not just that the priests did great individual evil but also that the institution itself utterly failed to do anything about it or even abetted it.
However, the illicit nature of psychedelics makes those kinds of controls or institutions impossible or very hard to put in place.
Finally, for the abuse in the MAPS MDMA trial (which was 1 patient out of 200 participants) to be used as evidence that psychedelic therapy is more prone to abuse, you'd have to look at the rate of abuse among therapists and psychologists as a whole to know if it's par for the course or something extraordinary.
Bad actors will try to take advantage of the vulnerable -- and these drugs put you in a more vulnerable position than otherwise -- so your warning still stands. I just don't think these issues are unique to this stuff other than the legal status.
Yeah I've never tried any psychedelic. I once had a girl offer to 'trip sit' me but honestly, I was too worried about old traumas coming up. I liked her and I did not want her to see that.
>Why don't you display actual milligram quantitative amounts? #
> In short, we are not allowed to do so. In the United States, the handling of Schedule I substances (MDMA, LSD, Cannabis, etc) is restricted to those with a valid license. Forensic labs such as DDL and others require and obtain licensure in order to operate. An unpublished administrative rule stipulates that licensed labs are not allowed to provide quantitative data to the public, reportedly for fear of providing 'quality control' to dealers and suppliers of black market products.
https://www.drugsdata.org/about_data.php
In Europe, one can send samples to drug checking services and get information about potency, but here the US Government is basically admitting that it's artificially inflating the risk of overdose by denying consumers information they need to stay safe. They can point to these inflated harms as justification for continued persecution of individuals who use drugs.
